Mind What You Think: How to find balance and enjoy freedom from stress

By Dr Karen Graham

HOW TO FIND BALANCE IN YOUR MIND. This book provides a different psychological approach for stress management and regaining mental control. With a unique framework about the way the mind works, this is the simple way to get peace fast and mentally stronger.

A holistic mindfulness approach for managing the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Light Ideas Press Pty Ltd
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780646998220

Dr Karen Graham

Dr Karen Graham (MBBS, FRANZCP, FCAP) is an adult, child & adolescent psychiatrist.

Book preview

Introduction

Not all your thoughts have purpose. However, they all have effects. Your mind has a major role in stressful experiences, and after reading this book you will appreciate that you are in the process of mastering your ability to balance your mental world.

Part 1 discusses how habits are involved with the way you think, and the types of thinking that result in stress and anxiety. Part 2 describes important concepts involved with awareness that enable you to find mental balance, which is essential for building resilience to stress. Part 3 provides practical suggestions that are easy for you to start using immediately. These involve direct ways you can respond to unhelpful thinking, and to manage internal conflict.

As an adult and child psychiatrist, I often provide examples that are drawn from a combination of clinical experiences, to convey ideas more clearly. These can also help you to identify similar issues that you might be having. Anxiety can involve various types of trauma. However, this book is focused on mental reactions and habits which can also cause anxiety, or might contribute to trauma-related anxiety.

It was written to improve your understanding about stress, and giving yourself this opportunity will encourage you to take charge of any unhelpful thinking. You will learn how to quickly restore more peace of mind when you are triggered. You will discover that stressful reactions or habits don't have to determine your experiences, or sabotage your success.

You will be achieving more mental clarity and freedom. This is genuinely empowering.

PART 1

Understanding How Your

Mind Causes Stress

chapter 1

The Significance of

Mental Habits

What you quickly tend to notice and think, involves

mental habits.

Personal judgements and beliefs are reinforced over time.

Experiences can repeat due to similar awareness and

understanding.

There is an important duality to your mind that involves awareness. You have a conscious mind with thoughts that you are aware of, although many thoughts slip by unnoticed. You also have a much larger subconscious-unconscious mind that is hidden from your awareness. This aspect of your mind is powerfully influenced by your surroundings; and the way you interpret and adapt to it results in habits involving the way you think, as well as familiar experiences.

Thinking on the Beaten Tracks

You inherit genetics that influence your temperament and thinking style, just like for your eye colour. Also, how you individually reacted, and responded, to the environment you were exposed to as a child, has a lot to do with the way you think now. This is evident by the differences in children from the same family, despite being exposed to very similar influences.

As a child, your impressionable younger mind absorbed, processed and stored a vast amount of information without you being consciously aware of it. This included the values, opinions and attitudes of your family and the society you were raised in, as well as all the information about your personal experiences. This provided you with important mental foundations. The connections in your brain, and invisible pathways involving your mind that were used a lot, became hardwired and fast-tracked. The results are mental habits. In other words, you now find it quick and easy to think along similar tracks. You find it easy not to give something a second thought—not a radically different thought, anyway.

As an individual, your mental habits are unique because you occupied and adapted to your own little space in the world. You mentally adjusted to snugly fit your particular niche. Nobody else was exposed to exactly the same environmental input as you, and nobody else's mind responded in exactly the same way that your mind did. This ensured that you have a very personal way of viewing and interpreting things.

It also means that the way you think can't be fully appreciated by anyone else. Perhaps your own thinking can be a mystery to yourself sometimes. Automatically absorbing information with your unique way of mentally adjusting to it continues throughout life. Therefore, anything that you now expose yourself to, such as what you prefer watching on television and the people you interact with, continues to reinforce and contribute to mental habits.

In addition, you readily accept the way you think. It can be easy to have blind faith in why you think the way you do. As you grew up, it was quite natural to rely on what you were told was good for you, or right for you. You accepted what to value, what to believe and to trust. However, you would probably think very differently if you had grown up in a different time or place, and been exposed to different information.

It can be reassuring to have confidence and believe in your ability that you make free choices regarding what to think. But are you that free? Your unconscious and conscious minds are deeply entangled. The unconscious mind is out of your direct control, and most of the time it is urging your conscious thinking to simply go along with it. This means that when you consciously evaluate something, you tend to justify or confirm what is already in your hidden mind. You are not aware that you are using the same mental tracks that automatically agree with the way you have previously processed and stored information. So mental habits are determining what you generally think, whether it is helpful to you or not. The inner connections are often too fast-tracked for you to truly make free, unbiased choices.

However, your unconscious and conscious minds can also be at odds with each other. So sometimes your unconscious mind can be challenging your conscious mind. This could relate to unresolved mental or emotional issues. Important information that you have pushed aside, or that is not compatible with the way you want to think, involves inner mental defenses. These are working to keep the unwanted information blocked from your conscious awareness, and they also involve mental habits. But this information remains ever poised to activate.

Your unconscious mind has the capacity to intrude and demand your attention, perhaps when you least expect it. For example, in your dreams you might glimpse elements about an important issue. If you haven't resolved something in your waking life your unconscious mind can play it out as you sleep, alerting you to it and trying to challenge your thinking about it. Having repeated dreams could involve your mind trying to tell you something about an issue that would change your understanding about it. Or during the day a hidden issue could trigger a disruptive reaction. It was like another person inside of me came out—it isn't me! If you don't recognise a reaction in yourself, it might relate to something very deep within your mind that needs your awareness to be resolved.

Your unconscious mind is always influencing your conscious mind. Mostly this involves mental habits that keep you thinking and confirming the same information. Sometimes your hidden mind challenges you to consciously reconsider something, to shift your thinking onto a different track.

The way you think is also highly connected to what you selectively focus your attention on, although what grabs your attention can happen quite automatically. A lot of the time your mind notices particular things more than others, and naturally this involves what is more important to you. This is consistent—along the beaten tracks— with the way your mind already thinks. Therefore, without consciously realising it, your inner mind's influence over your attention means that very often you 'see' similar things. If it is a mental habit to look for something, eventually you will find what you are looking for. And you have confirmation.

In addition, it can be a habit to focus attention on particular thoughts more than others. Selectively focusing your attention involving your own thoughts is necessary to avoid mental chaos. You do it automatically. But again, it means that the way you think is easily reinforced.

Raelene often thought she was being judged by other people. She seemed to be on the lookout for people, including complete strangers, to instantly dislike her or have a negative opinion about her. And yet, Raelene said, 'I can't understand why people smile at me or say nice things about me'.

The more often or intensely you focus attention on something, the more you are noticing it and probably thinking about it in the same way. So you keep seeing it and thinking it—or perhaps thinking it and looking for it, then seeing it—without realising how much you are doing it. You simply seek confirmation of what you already think and your mind latches onto any evidence to justify it. Then of course the same experiences can continue happening. Mental habits make it harder to view things differently, and to respond with different thoughts in different situations. And like Raelene, it is easy to dismiss different thinking.

You naturally take for granted that the way you think is right. And because your thinking has evolved from your unique perspective, it isn't wrong. However, mental habits involving fast-tracked reactions, have a lot to do with it.

Habits Harden Opinions

Many thoughts could be ignored if they weren't attached to feelings. However, emotional feelings are involved in everyday thinking. You automatically place a value of worth on all the information your mind takes in. This means that you prefer this over that, or dislike this option more than that one. Making value judgements enables you to choose what you want, and to make decisions.

People react more to opinions than facts; when they are challenged it is easy to see that they have a strong emotional component. People can fire up pretty quickly to defend them. Opinions are feeling influenced conclusions involving personal preferences. How much you are attached to an opinion involves specific feelings, as well as the strength of those feelings. This is why particular issues are more important to you than others. The more strongly you hold an opinion and are resistant to changing it, the more it can reflect hardwired habits involving strong mental-emotional connections.

As you were growing up your mind wanted to understand and find meaning in what was happening to you and going on around you, to make sense of it. As a result, important core opinions were formed early in your life. And because your mind adapted to the environment you grew up in, naturally you ended up sharing many of the opinions of people around you. The most significant opinions you hold are moral judgements and beliefs. These influence the way you view yourself and the world. Although these opinions were probably not consciously chosen by you, mental habits reinforced them over time.

Consider how easy it is to disregard another person's opinion when it is opposite to yours—unless you give proper attention to understand their perspective and why they have a different opinion. You can't help but focus attention on aspects of the issue that are more important to you, while ignoring aspects that are not. Likewise, habits involving your attention and thinking can keep you holding on to personal judgements and beliefs, even if they are unhelpful.

I'm not very smart. Nobody appreciates me. It is easy to see that holding an emotionally charged opinion like one of these could affect everyday life. Your mind is automatically a bit alert, looking for confirmation of inner judgements and beliefs, and ready to react to the slightest evidence of it.

Carlo said, 'I've always been disbelieved and treated badly my whole